Excite

Hot or Not hit 30,000+ unique IPs on day one from 42 emails

Hong seeded the site with himself, his co-founder, and photos from Excite Personals, then emailed a link to 42 friends at 2pm. By end of day the logs showed over 30,000 distinct IP addresses, likely 100,000+ actual people given how many used AOL and dial-up proxies.

“it was 42 people, which I counted it later, but you know, 'cause 42 is a magic number, right? Yeah, of course. But anyway, so I sent it out and like, it just immediately took off. And I think by the end, that was at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and by the end of the day, we had had like, 30-something thousand IP addresses in our logs, distinct, one unique.”